“Mr. Quaid, can you hear yourself? She’s real because you dreamt her?” – Total Recall
Every pizza can be a personal pizza if you believe in yourself.
It’s the spooky season running up to Halloween, so, why not get a little strange and think about the dark side of things. I mean, with a chuckle or two.
Philip K. Dick is dead.
I think.
In life, Dick was obsessed with one overriding theme: that reality ain’t what it used to be. In his stories, he focused on things not being what they seemed to be. During his life he was dirt poor, and drug addicted. Back then, I hear, the goal of hippies was to do as many drugs as they could and not get caught.
But enough about the Tour de France.
If that wasn’t enough, Dick was also paranoid, so I imagine having him over for dinner would have been, well, interesting, especially if he was in the midst of a meth binge.
I wonder if Dick ever tried speed dating?
But his vision caught up with the world and since his death many movies and at least two television series have been based on his work. I’ll say, if you stop The Man in the High Castle at the end of season one, it’s a pretty good show. And some of the movies have been entertaining.
We are, however, getting to the point in the news cycle where Dick’s vision seems to be on the verge of being able to be real as he wrote a lot about machine intelligence, so let’s review A.I.
In the last few days, Jack Dorsey of O.G. Twitter© fame, introduced an A.I. named Dessa that he claims was entirely trained on spoken language. If true, this is a huge increase in the amount of information that A.I.s can be trained on, as the spoken word contains so much more information than the same words as written down.
I have a Slovakian friend who’s a sound tech. And a Czech one, too. And a Czech one, too.
We had speech far before we had writing, and the intonation, timbre, pitch, and timing of words all have meaning that is very difficult to catch in the written word. I don’t need to have to wonder what The Mrs. means when she asks, “What are you doing?” because that sentence, though it can contain hundreds of different meanings, is always very clear from the way she says it. This is unlike when The Mrs. says, “Don’t leave your socks in the front room.”
I have no idea what The Mrs. means by that one.
Training A.I. by voice is, I suppose, the next phase of A.I. development. Add in the capacity to process text, and you’ve got at least twice the training material, if not an order of magnitude more.
What’s next?
I don’t trust the LGBT community, they never give straight answers.
Well, why not mimic the sensory input of a child in a robot, and have the A.I. interact with the physical world the way an infant human would? You can mimic the stimuli that a child feels, from being tired, to being hungry, to being alone, to feeling pain and discomfort.
I’ve often thought that the limiting factor in the training of A.I. was in giving it limits, i.e., bounding the formless void that it dreams in with walls and time and sensation. My thought has been it is the existence of those very limits that created consciousness.
So now, an “infant” A.I. is trained and conditioned on the world. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a real world, it could be a simulation, since the A.I. could easily be placed in a realistic video game engine to experience the world.
And it would be easy to do this with 100,000 A.I.s at a time, discarding all of those that didn’t meet the parameters the researcher was looking for into electronic oblivion, even if they were conscious. The researcher could use just the best of them as templates to build all of the A.I.s for the next phase of development.
Those A.I.s then would just be copies of the A.I. that had the “actual” experience.
Paging Philip K. Dick.
All her genes were hand me downs.
If that worked, and the researcher gave it a body, well, we’re straight into Bladerunner territory where we, humanity, may have created something that is indistinguishable from a conscious human being out of this laboratory. I’ll note, if it’s indistinguishable, at what point would we have to call it alive?
At what point would we have to call it human?
Can it get worse?
Certainly!
The post is titled Manmade Horrors Beyond Human Comprehension, so I’ve gotta live up to that.
It gets worse. What happens if we use all that simulation data . . . on us.
Aldous Huxley famously wrote Brave New World, which, arguably is closer to reality than Orwell’s 1984. But I digress, that’s fodder for another post.
Brave New World centered around a caste system. In it, there were five levels:
- Alphas: the intellectual elite.
- Betas: smart, but not independent and not capable of revolt.
- Gammas: mass-produced drone men with some skills.
- Deltas: no-skill laborers, can’t read.
- Epsilons: barely above animals.
These creatures were based on genetic engineering, chemical manipulation, and conditioning.
Based on what we’ve seen with immigration, it certainly seems like Brave New World is the goal. I’ll let you fill in the blanks.
Hey, could Vivek’s next scam be a ShamWow of an idea?
At what point are humans replaced by A.I. in the caste system our overlords would have?
At what point do they use A.I. to create a Skinner Box for conditioning humans based on A.I. research?
At what point do they cease needing wild-born humans at all?
At what point will they want to discard us?
We seem to be messy and independent, which isn’t good for the bottom line, and certainly not good for the comfort of the elite.
These risks certainly do seem to converge, one a man-like artificial servant that is born of hundreds of thousands of sacrifices, and one a neutered caricature of a human built to serve the needs of a ravenous elite.
Thankfully Dick and Huxley were paranoid mad dreamers and nothing like that could ever happen. And don’t think I’m a paranoid drug user. Don’t you be calling me a Dick!
Besides, that’s the word that The Mrs. keeps using when she mentions socks. Whatever could she mean?
